Various mail facing devices have been proposed to facilitate the sorting of mail for its distribution. These devices customarily include a mailbox having a plurality of different compartments into which different types of mail may be placed by the customer so as to enable the postal employee to more easily and quickly cancel and sort the deposited mail. While these mail facing devices have been somewhat satisfactory for their intended purpose, the random order in which the mail was collected in each compartment required the postal employee to further orient or face each piece of mail before the postage could be cancelled and the letters sorted.
In order to increase the speed and ease by which deposited mail can be cancelled and sorted, the mail facing device of the present invention has been devised to maintain the proper orientation of the mail, i.e. "face" the mail, such that the upper right hand corner of a letter containing the postage stamp is maintained in the same position within a collected stack or bundle of mail. The device of the present invention comprises, essentially, a chute positioned behind and adjacent to a Post Office wall having a standard mail drop slot. Indicia is provided on the front of the Post Office wall adjacent to the standard mail drop slot showing the proper orientation of a letter and instructing the customer how to insert mail into the slot. The chute communicates with a bin having a horizontally disposed collection plate mounted in a collection bin. The collection plate is movable in a vertical plane within the bin and gradually moves toward the bottom of the bin as deposited letters become stacked thereon. A door is provided on one end of the bin so that a full bin of correctly faced mail can be emptied by the postal employee. The chute and bin are preferably constructed of transparent material to allow for constant viewing of the mail collection by a postal employee and intervention thereby in case of a problem.